Amazon

The Amazon is the planet's largest remaining rainforest, teeming with more wildlife than anywhere else on Earth. But this majestic rainforest is caught between the twin destructive forces of deforestation and climate change. Greenpeace is campaigning for an end to deforestation in the Amazon by 2015 and globally by 2020.

The Amazon is a vast and majestic rainforest teeming with an estimated quarter of all known land species. The jaguar, the pink river dolphin, the sloth, the world's largest flower, a monkey the size of a toothbrush and a spider the size of a baseball are just a few of the species that we know about - there are many more yet to be discovered.

It is also home to over 20 million people including hundreds of indigenous peoples, some of which have never been contacted by the 'outside world'.

And finally, the Amazon stores 80 to 120 billion tonnes of carbon, helping to stabilise the planet's climate.

The latest updates

Deforestation is very bad news for the environment and for the climate. It is bad news for biodiversity and releases greenhouses gases into the atmosphere – we know that. But the science is increasingly certain that deforestation is...

For eight years, the Soya Moratorium has protected the Amazon rainforest from deforestation. It has just been renewed for the eighth time . But what happens when it ends for good, 18 months from now?
The Soya Moratorium was...

The Belgian authorities have impounded six containers of Brazilian Amazon timber from Rainbow Trading, the company responsible for Amazon destruction we told you about last week. The authorities have confirmed two of the containers...

Today, in waters outside of a Rotterdam port, activists continued tracking illegally sourced timber arriving from the Brazilian Amazon. They confronted a French flagged ship coming from a sawmill dealing illegal timber destined for...

Sawmills in the Brazilian Amazon are laundering illegal timber and sending shipments overseas. It's against the law to place illegal timber on the European market, yet the authorities are doing very little about it.
Two weeks...